LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

By Burton W. Cole

I’m lost when it comes to geography and it’s all the fault of major league sports.

Instead of geography, what I paid attention to as a school boy was sports. I became decent at math to calculate batting averages, earned run averages, points per game and yards per carry. Those were important aspects of life.

I studied the sports pages more thoroughly than any stupid social studies or history textbook.

Let me take you back to 1970 and let’s peek at the geographical divisions of leagues, shall we?

In baseball, here in the National League WEST, we have the Los Angeles Dodgers (check), the San Francisco Giants (check), the San Diego Padres (check), the Houston Astros (um), the Cincinnati Reds (huh?) and the Atlanta Braves (ooo-kaaay).

I learned as a 10-year-old that Cincinnati and Atlanta are out WEST!

I’d turned 11 by the time football season kicked off. I confirmed from the league standings that my Cleveland Browns were in the Central U.S.

And, according to league officials, Atlanta was WEST of us, and Dallas and St. Louis were located somewhere over there on the EAST COAST.

If you can’t trust the NFL, who can you trust? They must know where these cities are because visiting teams have to fly to them every week.

I did get a little confused when basketball season tipped off. The NBA moved both Atlanta and Cincinnati into the Central Division with Cleveland and, um, Baltimore.

Weird. The NFL and MLB both thought Baltimore was in the East, and Atlanta in the West.

That was more than 50 years ago. Thanks to Google, it’s a lot easier to find where places are. Which is why in the NFL, Dallas still plays in the East with New York, Washington and Philadelphia, and you can pinpoint Indianapolis somewhere in the South with Houston, Jacksonville and Tennessee.

It’s clear why American kids can’t find Butte, Montana, on the wall map. First of all, Butte doesn’t have a major league sports team.

Secondly, if it had, the sports cartographers would have placed it in the Pacific Isles. Or in Australia or Germany or somewhere over that direction.

As an adult, I probably should make some effort to figure out where places really are. If I ever want to go to Italy, for example, do I steer the car to the north or to the south?

Not that I worry about things like that. These days, a GPS lady tells me where to go and how to get there.

Even when I arrive, I don’t know where I am. I just turned right in two miles and took a slight left in 800 feet, and boom, I was at the address I needed without a clue as to where it fit on a map.

As a boy, I had a compass that perpetually pointed north northeast. I got the thing where I shopped for all my best stuff — inside a Cracker Jacks box.

If I was lost in the woods, for example, not only did I have my compass, but I had the knowledge that moss grows on the north side of trees. Except in the woods behind our farm, moss grew all around the tree.

So I learned from my compass and nature, that north was wherever I happened to be looking at the moment. East was always to my right. Until I turned right, then north and east both shifted. It was impossible to ever actually travel east.

I suppose this is why the big league sports mapmakers kept tossing Atlanta next to the Pacific Ocean and couldn’t decide where Dallas actually was.

This is also why out in the country where I lived, we came up with an infallible way to get people to where they wanted to go:

“Well, let’s see, you head thataway for a fur piece until you come to where the Johnson’s barn used to be. You’re gonna want to hitch a right there and keep going until you come to the fence where that cow with one horn’s usually grazing. Take a left, and it’s right past where ol’ man Kuzmicki’s hay wagon fell apart that summer 50 years ago and dropped 200-some bales all over the road. You can’t miss it.”

If that fails, just head north and take a right at Atlanta.

Burt hopes he can find his way home tonight. Send maps to burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.